May Day: International Workers’ Day¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter presents May Day not as a mere historical commemoration but as the living emblem of revolutionary internationalism, a day whose original promise of working-class unity has been systematically betrayed by the labour leaderships of both the Second and Third Internationals. The core argument is that May Day’s true content—the struggle for world socialism—was abandoned first in 1914 when labour and trade-union leaders sided with their respective ruling classes in the First World War, and later when the Russian Revolution’s internationalist impulse was strangled by the Stalinist bureaucracy’s turn to “nationalist socialism.” The text insists that the wave of working-class optimism following 1917, when German, French, Japanese, and American workers defended the Soviet Republic through internationalist action, was crushed by reformist leaders who saved capitalism and by a degenerated Soviet state that abandoned Lenin’s perspective.
The chapter draws heavily on the historical trajectory from the First World War through the rise of fascism to the Second World War, arguing that the reformist reliance on national gradual reform culminated in Hitler and Mussolini, the destruction of Europe, and the “most terrible of all wars.” The fall of the fascist dictators is presented as the opening of a revolutionary upsurge in Europe, but one that is immediately threatened by the same forces that betrayed the workers before: the labour and Stalinist leaders now disseminate “Vansittart poison”—a reference to the chauvinist doctrine of collective German guilt propagated by Sir Robert Vansittart—to prevent the European workers from breaking national barriers and making socialist revolution. The polemic is directed squarely against these labour and Stalinist leaders, who are accused of aiding the capitalist class in inciting fratricidal strife and preparing a third imperialist war. The Fourth International is presented as the sole inheritor of the May Day tradition, standing for the international solidarity of all toilers without distinction, and the chapter closes with an appeal to the revolutionary lineage of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Connolly, and MacLean.